“Pursue the enemy when it’s on the run”
The maxim that a routed enemy is to be pursued and forced to surrender: it is as old as war itself. Pursue the enemy when it’s on the run! It can be found in our tradition as early as Leviticus 26:7-8.
When the enemy is in retreat, one must not give it time and space to regroup. One must chase it down. That is how to secure an enduring victory.
And that is what is required of Israel and America today.
In war, maximum energy equals maximum humanity.
– Leon Trotsky
Trotsky’s dictum may not hold true in some wars, particularly not in wars that are equally matched and doomed to stalemate. But it’s clearly true in today’s Mideast wars.
The stalemate has been decisively broken. Israel has all but finally won these wars. It has broken the backbone of its — and our — enemies. What remains to be done is to consolidate the victories on the ground.
The faster this is done, the more humane it will be. The greater the delays we impose on Israel before letting it finish it off, the greater the cost will be in lives and human suffering.
And that means that it must pursue the enemy. It must not give it the time and space to regroup, the way Biden and Obama repeatedly forced it to do.
Israel has routed all three major enemies of the West in the region – Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran. It is now only a question of consolidating the victory, the sooner the better.
Let us underline that point. Every delay imposed by a new “peace” deal or for another evasive truce: every such delay means in reality an inhumane dragging out of the suffering. That’s the reality, no matter how much our politicians and our media present it as a matter of humanity.
Thousands of Gazans have already died unnecessarily from this brutally inhumane “humanitarian” policy – the policy of Biden and, too often, of Witkoff. Thousands more will die for it if we continue it.
It is a policy of virtue signaling. It is a policy of vanity and posturing. It is not a policy of honesty and morality.
‘Twere well to do it, then ‘twere well to do it well, and quickly.
– Shakespeare
Even worse than another delay would be what many people are now advocating: to throw Israel’s victories away for the sake of another inadequate peace deal. These deals have repeatedly led to the defeated enemies coming back as a worse threat.
It’s what Obama did in Gaza in 2014. It’s what brought on October 7. It’s what enabled Hamas to launch another, even bloodier war with Israel.
It’s what the world did in Lebanon, letting Hezbollah continue tyrannizing over the country until Israel finally took it down.
It’s what Obama-Biden did in their Iran policies, giving Iran the means to get ever closer, “peacefully”, to a genocidal nuclear arsenal.
Israel is striving to bring these wars finally to a close. They are not our wars; they are wars that have been fought for decades against our side by Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas. We have too long stopped Israel from bringing them to a close. For decades it obeyed our demands that it not engage to win.
America’s side of the wars is finally seriously engaging in them, because Israel is finally seriously engaging in them this time. And it’s ending them. Ending them by winning them.
It has already won them militarily. Won them convincingly.
All that remains to be done is to pursue the defeated forces and consolidate the wins over them, until they are brought to surrender. That is what would finally provide the Mideast real peace.